Philosophical musings on Quanta & Qualia;  Materialism & Spiritualism; Science & Religion; Pragmatism & Idealism, etc.

   Post 107.  March 08, 2020 continued . . .

  The God Problem

   Big Bang : Magical or Mechanical?

 Speaking of “design”, Bloom discusses a new kind of design process in Wolfram’s “New Kind of Science”. It’s based on a novel method of computing, in the form of “Cellular automata”. As with computer generated Fractals, the “Game of Life”27, computed with automata, begins with simple rules (laws), but then acts as-if it’s alive and evolving. “It has been used by  . . . . to convey the somewhat counterintuitive notion that ‘design’ and ‘organization’ can spontaneously emerge in the absence of a designer.” But not in the absence of a Programmer to estab-lish the laws of evolution! That’s where my understanding of upward evolution differs from Bloom’s. The computer and its operating system didn’t just appear out of thin air. And the Big Bang with its natural laws & initial conditions & pre-set cosmic constants didn’t just “spontaneously emerge” from nothing-ness. The only reasonable alternatives to explain that magic trick are A> an eternal self-existent Multiverse, or B> an eternal self-existent Programmer. Either the rabbit was always in the hat, or the magician put it there. Scenario A> is usually en-visioned as completely physical (material), while B> is assumed to be meta-physical (mental). But, matter is always found in space & time, while mind seems to be non-local and atemporal. So, which makes more sense as the First Cause of this world — most notable for the non-physical property of Conscious-ness, that baffles scientists and philosophers with the “Hard Question” : why and how sentient creatures evolved with the meta-physical sense of Qualia, and of Phenomenal Experience, in addition to the normal physical properties?  

Atheists seem to attribute creative power to stochastic Randomness. But Bloom alleges, “the creative power of that cosmos has produced an apparent randomness that’s pulling the wool over your eyes. . . . Behind every chaos there may be simple rules”. Mathematicians have determined that there is always order underlying “apparent randomness”. As Wolfram says, “you get the probabilistic unpredictablity of quantum mechanics even from what’s in effect a deterministic underlying model.” Yet, again, who or what is the determiner of order? Bloom ironically suggests that “they may have started with a handful of magic beans”. Which again implies the existence of a an intentional Magician; which is what his theory was trying to avoid. Ironically, he then begins to use a series of anthropo-morphic metaphors to describe the “obsessive-compulsive”, “persistent”, “driven”, “motivated” universe. Sounds as-if his world is a living organism. And he even suggests the analogy of the developing universe as an Embryo. “And there is more than an even chance that we humans have free will, competition, dominance hierarchies, love, and war because we inherited them from the cosmos that gave us birth.” So, he just can’t seem to resist the image of the Big Bang as childbirth. But who is the mother or father?

Bloom’s “corollary generator theory”28, of extracting a plethora of complex things from simple Platonic Forms, leaves him with a quandary. “How does creativity emerge from simple rules?” He means, how does creativity emerge without a Creator? Continuing the anthro-metaphors,  “Are we really instruments of a cosmos searching out there potential, instruments of a cosmos that uses her progeny to reinvent herself?”   +

                       Post 107 continued . . . click Next

Big Bang
Creation
or
Continuation
?

Weak Metaphors for Creativity

   Bloom, like most atheists, prefers to avoid the anthro-morphic implications of Natural Laws, & subjective Qualia, & the mysterious emergence of Mind. But why not make use of better, more descriptive metaphors to explain the “creativity of evolution”?
   The weak alternatives are mechanical order out of randomness, or Quantum particles fluctuating out of Nothingness. Bloom uses the term “creativity” to describe Evolution. But what better example of creativity do we find in the natural world than the artifices of Homo Sapiens.
   Termite mounds pale in comparison to the Sagrada Familia. So why use weak analogies, when we have access to stronger ones, such as human Designers & Programmers?

27. Game of Life :
   “The game is a zero-player game, meaning that its evolution is determined by its initial state, requiring no further input. One interacts with the Game of Life by creating an initial config-uration and observing how it evolves”
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life
   This is similar to my own notion of Intelligent Evolution. The programmer establishes the basic rules for creating a universe. Then selects initial conditions for the variables, and hits Enter. The rest is merely number crunching, except that the operating system includes a role for Life & Mind.

28. Corollary Generator Theory
   Based on Wolfram’s use of corollaries in his New Kind of Science. It assumes that many smaller simpler facts may be extracted from a general axiom, like smaller & smaller Russian Dolls.
https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Corollary.html

The God Problem

How a Godless Cosmos Creates

Howard Bloom

Psychology; Sociology; Political Science

The Problem of Existence